Conclusion

Up top—where RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and even 2070 live—Nvidia is the only name in town. Its prices reflect this. If you want to play up in that league, you have no choice but to pay the company’s 'luxury tax.

In short, it’s not enough for GeForce RTX 2060 to replace a Pascal-based card at the same price, add RT cores and tell enthusiasts that the games are coming soon. No, GeForce RTX 2060 needs to be faster and cheaper than the competition in order to turn heads.

A price tag of $350/£330 puts GeForce RTX 2060 in the same territory as GeForce GTX 1070. It’s less expensive than AMD’s Vega 56 and Nvidia’s 1070 Ti. Yet, it beats both cards more often than not. The geometric mean of RTX 2060’s average frame rate across our benchmark suite at 2560x1440 is 77.9 FPS. Apply the same calculation to GTX 1070 Ti and you get 76.2 FPS. RX Vega 64 achieves 77.8 FPS. RX Vega 56 sits at 69.8 FPS. GTX 1070 lands just under that, at 67.2 FPS.

Nvidia’s biggest sin is probably calling this card a GeForce RTX 2060. The GeForce GTX 1060 6GB launched at $250. GeForce GTX 960 started at $200. GeForce GTX 760 debuted at $250. Now, the company is pushing its xx60 series all the way up to $350. The performance we measured certainly justifies such a price. But it probably could have been called a 2060 Ti or the 2070 and made fewer waves.

The other interesting take-away from the launch is that Nvidia’s hybrid rasterization/ray tracing approach is still viable down at the 2060’s price point. As far back as our first deep-dive into the Turing architecture, we wondered how useful 36 RT cores would be on TU106 compared to TU102’s 68 RT cores. Now, we have a derivative GPU with just 30 RT cores, and it’s capable of over 60 FPS at 1920x1080 with all options, including DXR Reflection Quality, set to Ultra in Battlefield V. No doubt, that’s a testament to EA DICE and its optimization efforts, which continue in the form of an upcoming patch to enable DLSS support.

Still, we don’t draw conclusions based on what might happen down the road. Fortunately for Nvidia, RTX 2060 is generally faster than much more expensive cards in today’s games. Its 160W TDP does correspond to that higher performance. But it’s also still significantly more efficient than AMD’s Vega 56. We’re relatively confident that RTX 2060 Founders Edition, specifically, will see limited availability on geforce.com. Once it’s gone, Nvidia’s board partners need to keep prices close to the $350/£330 benchmark or else risk being undercut by very real competition from AMD and Nvidia’s previous generation.

I am not sure I would say it is faster, than a 1070ti. It seems that they trade blows throughout, at very similar FPS, for the most part. Price/performance, this is a winner, hands down, though, with the price being $50 cheaper than the cheapest 1070ti.

this is exactly the same trick nvidia played with its other cards. all the cards this gen got pushed into a higher price bracket; it used to be we got 40% or so performance improvement in the SAME price bracket. now we're getting zero performance increase across the price brackets, however if we stick to the same product lineup we have to pay for a 50% increase in price.

In other words completely useless raytracing support. You'd be bat <mod edit> crazy to go 1080p with raytracing compared to 1440p without raytracing. All its direct competitors in the same price bracket can do good 1440p, no amount of raytracing achievable at 1080p is going to make up for the extra resolution.

Despite the confusing market shifts the Nvidia have done with the 20 series, I think that the rtx-2060 is still probably a good value relative to the rest of the RTX lineup. If the launch prices are right and availability is good, then even if it is more expensive than a gtx-1060, it's still alright since it compares decently fps/$ to gtx 1070/1070ti's. It wasn't the amazing value that the 1000 series had at their launch compare to the 900 series, but its at least reasonable. However, the gtx-1160 is probably gonna be a thing later, so idk about buying the rtx-2060 right now.

I am not sure I would say it is faster, than a 1070ti. It seems that they trade blows throughout, at very similar FPS, for the most part. Price/performance, this is a winner, hands down, though, with the price being $50 cheaper than the cheapest 1070ti.

Performance could improve with driver updates though. Still, this is the most expensive x60 card to come out *checks notes* ever. Seems kind of a wash when you could pick up a used 1080 for the same price. I thought graphics card prices were supposed to drop this year

From Anandtech review: "The RTX 2060 (6GB) is simply no longer a ‘mainstream’ video card at $350... Against its direct predecessor, the GTX 1060 6GB, it’s faster by around 59%. In context, the GTX 1060 6GB was 80-85% faster than the GTX 960 (2GB) at launch, where presently that gap is more along the lines of 2X or more, with increased framebuffer the primary driver. But at $200, the GTX 960 was a true mainstream card, as was the GTX 1060 6GB at its $249 MSRP"

Nice! In the final verdict " It largely outperforms them all and at a lower price point." Mean while, reality is, using Tom's own numbers: it beats the Vega 64 in only 3 titles and the rest, it gets destroyed by up to 30%. Not to mention the frame times, where the Vega64 provides a vastly superior experience...

In other words completely useless raytracing support. You'd be crazy to go 1080p with raytracing compared to 1440p without raytracing. All its direct competitors in the same price bracket can do good 1440p, no amount of raytracing achievable at 1080p is going to make up for the extra resolution.

Is it? Well, until now, you could only go with higher resolution. Now you can choose to go with raytracing. I'd go for raytracing, since my monitor is 1080p. I don't think there's such an easy answer, it all depends on the user.

I'm sad to hear that the efficiency has dropped slightly. I was expecting the 2060 to be even with the 1070 worst case. What happened to the 12nm shrink? Do the ray tracing processors cause a dramatic drop in efficiency?

On the other hand I'm glad to hear that we're finally seeing a value improvement over Pascal. Even if its only a few bucks, its better than what the other Turing cards offer. I suspect that the price may drop further still when AMD Navi comes around later this year.

I've been running an overclocked (water cooled) 980ti for 4 or so years and I still cant justify an nvidia card. I paid $680 for my card, it gets about 18,000 3dmark in Firestrike (1080p). To me it's looking more and more like a Vega64 or AMD's next GPU are the only sensible upgrade.

Hopefully AIB versions will be at least $50 cheaper. Certainly that was case for the RTX 2070, where the FE is $599 whereas the AIBs are mostly around $499 - a full $100 cheaper. I'm on a GTX1050Ti (after my R9 390 died) and seriously want a higher end board; the RTX 2060 ticks all the boxes (except for 6GB VRAM - would have liked to see 8GB on it).